Flow data refers to a sequence of data that arrives sequentially, rapidly, and continuously in a large amount. Generally, flow data can be considered as a set of dynamic data that increases infinitely with time. Flow data appears in a wide range of application fields such as network monitoring, sensor networks, aerospace, meteorological measurement and control, and financial services. Through study on flow data, satellite cloud imagery monitoring, stock market trend analysis, network attack judgment, and the like can be performed.
In a process of observing or storing flow data in real time, the flow data needs to be compressed first due to the limitation of storage space.
For a same group of flow data, a higher compression rate indicates a lower requirement on storage space. However, in existing methods for compressing flow data, compression rates are not high enough, and therefore, a requirement on storage space is not the lowest.